Trump and guns

"These teachers love their students,” Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference. “And these teachers are talented with weaponry and with guns.” So if a “crazy man” entered such a school with murderous intent, Trump contended, “a teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened.”

Trump’s proposal has been widely disparaged on several grounds, but I can think of two more arguments that don’t seem to have occurred to other critics.

Armed parsons

First, when it comes to mass murder, school shootings represent just one piece of this problem. The worst shooting sprees in U.S. history occurred not in schools but at a rock concert (58 dead in Las Vegas last October), a nightclub (Pulse in Orlando, 2016, 49 dead), a movie theater (Aurora, Colorado, 2012, 12 dead, 58 wounded), a church (Sutherland Springs, Texas, 2017, 25 dead), a cafeteria (Luby’s in Killeen, Texas, 1991, 23 dead), a McDonald’s (San Ysidro, California, 1984, 21 dead), and a post office (Edmond, Oklahoma, 1986, 14 dead), among many gruesome others.

Must I go on? If we follow Trump’s logic, we’ll need to arm musicians, cafeteria workers, hamburger flippers, postal clerks, and movie ushers, not to mention priests, parsons, and rabbis.

"I hate your kid"

Second, Trump notwithstanding, schoolteachers don’t necessarily love their students. Some of them despise their students. What’s more, many students hate their teachers.

“My students are out of control,” blogged Natalie Munroe, an 11th-grade teacher at Central Bucks High School East, in October 2009. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners.” Some of her students, she wrote, are “utterly loathsome.” If she had her druthers, Munroe added, her report cards would include comments like “I hate your kid.”

I think also of Ronald James, who in the 1980s wrote a series of 15 angry essays in the Welcomat (now Philadelphia Weekly) about life on the front lines of Philadelphia public education. The targets of his complaints included bureaucratic red tape, indifferent administrators, clueless parents, and, yes, unruly students, many of whom “behave as if they have no responsibility at all for their education.” (Full disclosure: I was James’s editor for these essays.) Things came to a head in March 1990 when some 300 Overbrook High School students walked out of their classes to protest what they felt was James’s racist attack on his own students.

Bottles and broken jaws

Maybe Natalie Munroe and Ronald James are exceptions. But in the process of venting his frustrations, James became an underground cult hero among Philadelphia schoolteachers, who in those pre-Internet days photocopied each of his essays and eagerly circulated them from school to school. That response suggests to me that James was merely articulating thoughts that many other teachers shared but lacked the guts to express themselves.

When President Trump suggested arming teachers, I naturally found myself fantasizing how Ron James would have handled wild students, uncaring bureaucrats, parent-teacher conferences, and student protest demonstrations if he’d been packing heat. James is now retired. I picked up the phone and called him.

“It’s a bad idea,” Ron readily replied. “A lot of school violence comes from inside the school, not outside.” For example, an Overbrook student once walked into Ron’s classroom and shoved him. Another teacher had a bottle thrown at him. A third teacher was pummeled by several students, who broke his jaw. (I would add: I know a teacher elsewhere who was beaten up by a student’s mother.)

“I wouldn’t want to carry a gun in the classroom,” James said. “If someone’s beating on you and you have a gun, you’re likely to take it out and shoot him.”

Basketball fans

The best solution, James suggested, is armed guards and metal detectors (which most Philadelphia public high schools have already). At Overbrook, he said, “We had two armed policemen there every day. They were part of the school, fans of the basketball team.”

Hmmm. Those guards apparently couldn’t prevent occasional fights in the building. But at least nobody got killed.

“There should be guards in schools,” Ron insisted, “but teachers shouldn’t have that responsibility.”

Those are the words of a survivor of 23 years in inner-city public-school classrooms. If only Ron James possessed Donald Trump’s educational credentials.